Tech Talk - Type 3 Hydrogen Tanks - Design Process - Hydrogen Technology Explained - Hyfindr Rivalta
Hello, my name is Steven. Welcome to Hyfindr Tech Talks, where it is our goal to understand the technology in the hydrogen economy. Today, we are going to talk about tanks and not any tanks, but Type 3 tanks. With me is someone who has 30 years of experience in the forging industry and has worked very widely very internationally as well. He is from AST near LA and is connected directly to us. Welcome, Siggy. Sigfried Rivalta. Hello, Steven. Hello, everyone at the organization. It's a pleasure meeting you. I'm looking forward to a good conversation regarding tanks, COPVs for various of industries. Okay, Siggy. I already see you
coming up with the abbreviations. You are deep inside. So, please bear with us as we walk this line with you. So, let's start with the real basics. What types of tanks are there at all in this industry? Maybe you can help us to kick us off into that. Sure, we're glad to be. So, there is five different tanks that are today widely used in this market. The Type 1 is the type that has a steel tank or a metal tank with steel or aluminum used frequently for firefighter tanks for scuba diving and for industrial gases. The Type 2 tank is a tank that is steel tank and has a
glass or glass cum fiber winding around but only in that cylindrical section. So, it is not a fully wrapped tank. It's only a partly wrapped cylinder. That is used for different gases and to add to a higher pressures also. The Type 3 is a type with aluminum liners. The aluminum liner is mainly then bound with carbon fiber with a high strength carbon fiber and is one of the tanks that has the best filling rates. We will see later on that. Type 4 is a composite tank with carbon fiber. In other words, it is a liner that is made out of plastic or thermoplastic
and the rest is pretty much the same as the Type 3 when it comes to carbon fiber winding. That Type 5 is the liner-less cylinder. So, there is no liners. There's only two on the ends two connections they are made out of aluminum mount into the cylinder. Okay.
Those are the different types and so that means essentially Type 1 is all metal up to the other end type five is all, almost all composite or did I get this correctly? All composite. Correct. Okay, so the lightest type 5 is pretty much still in development. It is used in very isolated situations. It's a tank that's super light and therefore,
welcomed in the airspace area but widely used today are Type 1, 3 and 4, when Type 1 is the heaviest tank because it's a steel and when it comes to high pressure the walls are very thick. Therefore, it's a heavy tank and the Type 4 is the lightest tank in the market. Okay, maybe just the very basic. So, who came up with these numbers? Why do we even have this number? Why isn't the type 2 and type 1 or is that because they were developed after each other? Yeah. The business of the TLPB started pretty much with type 1 and as they developed over years and the pressure entire day went up into different types of applications and weight is very significant and very important and the type 1 was not a good application for especially in the aerospace area and everything let's say everything that flies needs to be light. Okay, thanks for this overview. So Siggy, I know you come from the world of Type 3. Can you take us a little bit deeper into that type of tank? And show us what's going on in that area? Of course. So, what you see on the slide is that the Type 1 is a fully metal tank. So, you have thick wall made of steel.
It's pretty straightforward. Type 2 you can see now the tanks from the inside that means it's metal inside aluminum or steel but on Type 3 it is clearly visible that you have an aluminum liner and the aluminum liner is a one piece liner. So, it is a one piece forged flow formed and closed liner. So, it's not welded, it's not any of the links or any gaps in between the two ends. Then the Type 4 tank has the HDPE liner and
has an insert aluminum. You see the HDPE there in color and then on the right side and on the left side you see the aluminum connections. The reason for that is you cannot connect a valve with high pressure into the each HDPE liner. It has to be metal. Metal to metal. So, they have a metal inset and other boards it is not a one piece liner. Okay. So,
then the Type 5 has no liner at all, as you can see on the inside. And regarding the Type 3, just also you know say in comparison to the others, in terms of operation and so on. Yeah that the Type 3 takes advantage from aluminum. It's a very high conductive material and
has therefore a lot of dissipation of heat during the filling process and I'm going to show you a little bit of process, what's happened during filling in another slide. So, the high thermal conductivity really sucks in the heat during the filling process and therefore we get more gas in the tank and getting more gas in the tank is a bigger range, a larger range for the title, wherever it's mounted. The metal liner does not bottle like a plastic liner. So, we can completely empty the liner as well. We don't have to leave any gas in to avoid the buckling of the liner. In other words, it was a bit test we have made. As a long-term tests, we have in a fast filling rate and with the fast filling capacity and a Type 3 is up to almost 100%, where the Type 4 is below that to 70-75%. You mentioned that the
specific advantages, during the refilling process also. Is this correct? The defueling process, yes. For the defueling process, the benefits are that the tank can be completely emptied. So, we don't have to leave pressure inside in order to maintain the liner in this position. Understood. It's metal. But I mean you mentioned earlier that you know in terms of when you are filling the tank that the Type 3 have a particular difference in comparison to the composites when the gas is going in. This is the main benefit right now in the Type 3. When you see the filling rate here, this is a CNG
application. It's a tank with 250 bar should fill to 20 gallon, gasoline gallon equivalent and when you see the fill rate on the left side on the station. It is filling. Duing the filling process the molecules starts colliding with each other at a very high speed. In the beginning the temperature goes down, as you can see in the middle graph below though until the temperature starts fast to rise as the pressure goes up. So, you can see on the left,below on the left graph that at 4100 PSI which is about 285 bars, the station shuts off for safety basin and then on the right graph, you can see you have not reached 100% fill. So what's happened now. When you see the bottom graph the temperature starts going down. So, it's cooling off slowly
and then I can refill if I have to in Type 4 four but under Type 3, I don't have that because that heat is getting into the liner. Okay, so therefore the molecules when they heat up and the heat goes into the line. I can get a better fill. The heat is not trapped in the tank. Okay, so I think that's a considerable advantage but I think it must be hard to manufacture or to make these aluminum shapes and all these composites. Can you say how you do that?
Yeah, so it is a different process than having made a liner out of the tube. So, by forging the tube we are getting different, we get very large diameters which is our focus to get diameters over the dimension that you normally buy and extruded pipes. Therefore, we start with the forging, as you can see on the left slide. The forging is more like like a dish and then we start spin forming after that and flow forming made out of two of aluminum stock of 6061. So, we started with two 61 billet and go into the tube shape at the end. There the next pass is done closing the tube at the ends
where there afterwards they are heat treated to T6 conditions and the machining at the ends that you can see here the the machine on the outside is to the mounting blocks for the cylinders. So that's an outside machining and the inside machining is to mount the valves. So, that is the neck mount you have there. So this neck mount is also in some applications strap mount. The neck mount is a very clean mounting. It is easy to inspect, it's also not touching the carbon fiber, which is a significant benefit versus the strap mounting. Okay, understood.
Furthermore, we go the wrapped. So we do carbon fiber wrapping. We use a wet process. There is wet and dry process. However, we use wet process which is probably the one most used in the market. And then we do the testing at the end and with cylinder before it leaves the factory is tested 100%, which is autofrettaged and the hydrostatic test. Okay. The autofrettaged testing lays the aluminum into the carbon fiber. The carbon fiber has a very low elongation. It's about 2-3 %, when the aluminum has elongation the 6061 between 12% and 16-18% in different cases. Therefore, the aluminum is stretched into the carbon fiber on the high pressure
and then the hydrotest brings it back to the original form and there the liner will cycle between those two areas for it's cycle life of 15 years in case of the hydrogen cylinders for high pressure. Sorry, I need to ask can you can you say that again? So the tank is actually expanded and the fiber brings it back into shape or did I get this wrong? Yeah, the liner is expanded into the wall of the carbon fiber. The liner inside the tank? Carbon has a very low elongation but the liner let it expand itself into the to the wall and afterwards the hydrotest which is at lower pressure. Between the those
two areas that cylinder is going to cycle for its life. Okay understood. Okay. Filling and unfilling or defueling. Okay, when you wrap that around the tank, just out of estimate, how long is the liner that you put like is this? You know like I always imagine that's supposed to be the endless let me say miles of tape that goes around there. Yeah, so it pretty much depends on the pressure. More the pressure, more the carbon fiber binding. Yeah. The aluminum or the liner is pretty much only a container for the for the gas. What gives us the integrity of the after the cylinder itself is to come fiber.
So, higher the pressure, the more fiber we get on those tanks and you can see in this one here. The carbon fiber thickness is much more than the aluminum thickness on the wall. Yes. The pressure is really depending how much fiber we have to wind on. How long does it take? It depends on the equipment. There is a very sophisticated equipment and has
a better output, higher rate. I would say for a cylinder, it depends on the size also and on average it's about an hour. There is multiple spindle machines available that can do more than one tank at the same time. So, depends on the equipment. Wow. Okay but I mean an hour is I think it's pretty good for such a big tank considering the diameters you do. So, also considering the diameters you do, where can we even find these kind of products in the hydrogen economy in total? Yeah, it goes from different to different application mainly for storage and transport, where we focus our products rather than doing it on port. It depends
on the weight also. Onboard storage tanks is very sensitive when transportation is a better fit for a number for the Type 3 because they're getting charged very fast. They are need to be discharged completely in order to get the benefits really and not occurring gas around back to the stations. So, that's one of the main reasons right now that Type 3 is used for that transportation in gases form. We also have some fleet operations. There's different applications where we use those Type 3 and in order to bring the molecule to the customer since the infrastructure is very weak still in the US, as it is in Europe and other countries. We don't have enough stations nor do we have pipelines to bring the hydrogen
to the customer. Therefore, we have to track it pretty much with those tracks and trailers. Okay, well. I mean things will surely develop but Siggy I need to ask you one more thing so the thing is that when I worked on a project at a time we also had the the topic of a tank and I mean it was one thing to find a tank and the other thing was you know did it have the right certification and you know actually that seemed to be even kind of the bigger hurdle to getting the actual tanks. So can you tell us a little bit about that? I mean since Type 3 have been around for a while, I would estimate that that it's taken care of.
Yeah, the certification luckily now is more going into towards the international certifications. The leaning on the ISO specs we used to have this difference on the CNG side. Luckily now on hydrogen, it is becoming more an international certification. So, we still have to go to this DOT or ISO. DOT certification level currently has a different certification like Europe but they're all in on the basics from the ISO. So, that's a very good trend. So, you
do the certification yourselves or you have? We have to have a third party that needs to monitor our operation. It is a certification first that goes to a process of testing, very long passes, where the DOT is involved from the beginning and and then also doing what direction the DOT is present in our facility. Okay. As you mentioned, that the certification is getting more and more international. Are there perhaps any other trends in the Type 3 tank that you can share with us? You know development that you are seeing from your end. Yeah, the ports are one of the areas that are leading up here. There is this effort in the United States at least and then in California. California has multiple ports that are changing their transportation system to clean energy, which is started with back with the natural gas and is moving now to battery and hydrogen electric. So, those areas
are really aggressively trying to get the ports clean by 2030-2035 and therefore, there we're doing some very nice projects with forklift operators and they converted to hydrogen electric and there is different background applications also and charging application with hydrogen full cells. Those are the main areas that we're focusing on right now. Okay, wonderful to see that these things are also getting inbuilt into those kinds of vehicles and yeah these are these are some good outlooks. So Siggy, unfortunately the time has flown through just as much as we passed through
the whole stages of the Type 3 tank. Thank you very much for sharing this really interesting insights. and for dialing in with us all the way from the Los Angeles area, where you are located. The good news is people can get in contact with you and find out more about these kind of storage options, when they go on Hyfindr.com, they can find your products there as just as they can find some other fitting products for this as well to build the hydrogen economy, which we are all engaging. Thank you very much, dear Siggy for this time and thank you to all those who watched for your time. It is been an absolute pleasure. If you liked it please give us a like or subscribe to our channel. It's been absolute pleasure. Thank you again,
Siggy and we hope that you come back to make another video with us sometime and to the viewers please feel free to watch any other videos. Thank you very much. All the best. Thank you, Steven. I appreciate it and definitely we are as a small company very flexible and we make our own liners. So, we welcome to do also customized products. Contact us or
contact Hyfindr. Thank you very much for this interview. Perfect. Thank you so much. Bye.
2023-08-02 16:26
